Spacebar
Every desktop at a glance
Seven desktops open and no idea which one had the thing I was looking for, so I cycled through all of them every time.
One keystroke shows every Space as a tile, each with live thumbnails of the windows actually on it. Arrow to the one you want, or press its number.
empty
12
3
4
5
←→move↩switch
Opening it the first time
On a Mac
This build is ad-hoc signed by me, not notarised by Apple, so macOS will refuse to open it on a double-click. That is Gatekeeper doing its job with an app it has never seen, and you only have my word for it, so the source is there if you would rather read it or build it yourself.
- 1Open the .dmg and drag Spacebar to Applications. Worth doing rather than running it from Downloads: macOS moves a quarantined app to a random read-only path, which breaks things in ways that look like bugs.
- 2Right-click it, choose Open, then confirm at the prompt.
Or from a terminal, once:
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Spacebar.appWhat it does
- Thumbnails of Spaces you are not on
- Not icons or names — actual pictures of the windows sitting on each desktop, captured on the spot. macOS offers no public API for this, which is why nothing else does it.
- One keystroke, then one more
- ⌃⌥Space opens it. Arrows or the mouse to move, Return to switch, or press a digit to jump straight to that desktop.
- Tells you what is where
- Each tile shows how many windows are on that Space, marks the one you are currently on, and says Empty rather than leaving a blank rectangle that reads as broken.
- Fits your screen
- Tiles shrink so the row always fits, whether you keep two desktops or ten. Appears on whichever display your pointer is on.
- Degrades honestly
- It leans on undocumented macOS internals. Every one is looked up at runtime, so an OS update that moves them turns a feature off and says so, rather than refusing to launch.
- Nothing is recorded
- Screen Recording permission is needed to photograph windows. The images live in memory for a few seconds and are thrown away. Nothing is written to disk or sent anywhere.
Specifics
- Platform
- macOS 14+
- Built with
- Swift · SwiftUI
- Permission
- Screen Recording
- Account
- None
- Telemetry
- None
Shortcuts
- ⌃⌥Space
- Show the switcher
- ← →
- Move between desktops
- ↩
- Switch to the selected one
- 1–9
- Jump straight to a desktop
- esc
- Close without switching
